Lacking a creative title

Last week was a pretty decent week of training – aside from slacking on Sunday (0) by deciding to switch those workouts to today. But I did go watch the Bradford Beach Triathlon and the WORS race at Crystal Ridge.

I was fairly impressed by the Bradford Beach Triathlon – it seemed to be pretty well organized, which was surprising since it was organized by Frank Dobbs, who has put on a couple of races I’ve done in the past and left some poor impressions. Perhaps I’ll give this race a try next year it it returns. The circuit style of the bike (6 loops) seems like it might be kind of unique.

The WORS race was neat, my buddy Mark rode in the sport class. He looked pretty gassed at the end, and then proceeded to tell me – “You should try this once.” Heh – I dunno, the one time I went truly MTB riding, it was fun, but hard in a painful way!

Anyways – as I said last week saw some good training – no need to bore you with the details – but I was thrilled to have a long ride that I actually had fun doing.

It was a bit over cast, VERY windy, but I had a blast for the first 4 hours of it, the last 90 minutes sucked royally, but were fun by association. It was a great ride – probably one of my best ever. I did it as a quasi race simulation ride – 3x TriWI Lannon Ride (http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=3062739), with an hour run afterwards. If you add in the short ride from where I parked to where the loop started the grand total was 111.6 miles + an 8 mile run. The time tally for the day was 5:23:56 (although it downloaded it a little longer?) with only 4 minutes total of stopping to refill my bottles at the start of each loop (a new record low for stop time). The run took a touch under 59 minutes.

What was reassuring, was my execution of the ride. I rode the first loop at basically HIM effort in an attempt to keep up with Matt (as I did not know the route) to learn the loop. I rode a bit more normally the 2nd and 3rd loop, but it was still a very strong effort. I ended the day with a 232 AP and 247 NP (first loop was 249/263). I don’t know how I would have fared running for 18 more miles, but I was in a pretty comfortable place when I finished the run.

I’m going to repeat the same workout next weekend, with the intent to spread the extra effort spent on the first loop out over the rest of the ride. I figure that if that sort of an effort (or slightly higher) is feasible for an Ironman, I should be able to repeat it again with minimal issues.

***Note to self***
Nutritionally I did 6 bottles of water, 17 gels (Vanilla Powergel gets old after about 10, and green apple is only good for 3 or 4 – definitely need “Plain” or a better mix) and a few thermolyte tabs. No gels or water on the run, but a couple of big slugs before I started it.